Blockchain detective

Designed for you by seasoned government crypto investigators and experts in financial compliance. Introduction to Cryptocurrency covers the basics of fiat and cryptocurrencies and how it can be used in both legitimate and illicit activities. The Bitcoin Trail delves into cryptocurrency mining, common criminal schemes where bitcoin is used. The Dark Web gives an overview of the part of the internet commonly used by criminals and their criminal enterprises. Cryptocurrency and the Criminal Element reveals the criminal element of cryptocurrency and how to identify and track.

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Content:

• Crypto Detectives Are After Shiba Whale Wallets Holding Billions
• Crypto exchange Binance hires former US Treasury criminal investigator
• Let us take on bitcoin gangs, urge police
• Category Archives: Cryptocurrency
• The Canadian Guide to Crypto Investing
• British police seize 'record' haul of cryptocurrency
• Lincolnshire Police
• Is a computer the best detective?
• UK detectives seize a record $250 million in crypto

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: Análisis de Syscoin - El cohete blockchain

Crypto Detectives Are After Shiba Whale Wallets Holding Billions

Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions.

Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it for the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast , and trying to figure out where she's hiding. In early June a year-old businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova walked on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of adoring fans. She was dressed, as usual, in an expensive ballgown, wearing long diamond earrings and bright red lipstick. She told the cheering crowd that OneCoin was on course to become the world's biggest cryptocurrency "for everyone to make payments everywhere".

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and is still the biggest and best-known - its rise in value from a few cents to hundreds of dollars per coin by mid had given rise to a frenzy of excitement among investors. Cryptocurrency as an idea was just entering the mainstream. Lots of people were looking to get involved in this strange new opportunity. All over the world, people were already investing their savings into OneCoin, hoping to be part of this new revolution.

But there was something very important these investors didn't know. To explain this, I need first to explain briefly how a cryptocurrency actually works. This is notoriously difficult - go online and you'll find hundreds of different descriptions, some of them utterly baffling to the non-specialist. But this is the first principle to grasp: money is only valuable because other people think it's valuable.

Whether it's Bank of England notes and coins, shells, precious stones or matchsticks - all of which have historically been used as money - it only works when everyone trusts it. For a long time, people have tried to create a form of digital money independent of state-backed currencies. But they have always failed because no-one could trust them.

They would always need someone in charge who could manipulate the supply, and forgery was too easy. The reason so many people are excited by Bitcoin is that it solves that problem. It depends upon a special type of database called a blockchain, which is like a huge book - one that Bitcoin owners have independent but identical copies of.

Every time a Bitcoin is sent from me to someone else, a record of that transaction goes into everyone's book. Nobody - not banks, not governments, or the person who invents it - is in charge or can change it. There is some very clever maths behind all this, but this means that Bitcoins can't be faked, they can't be hacked and can't be double-spent. I tested this explanation on my mother, the family technophobe, and she told me I'd failed to make it clear enough and should start again.

So don't worry too much if you don't follow it either. The key point is that these special blockchain databases are what make cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work. For its fans this is a revolutionary new form of currency, with the potential to sideline the banks and national currencies, and provide banking for anyone with a mobile phone. And if you get in early, there's the chance to make a fortune. Dr Ruja's genius was to take all of this and sell the idea to the masses.

But there was something wrong. In early October - four months after Dr Ruja's London appearance - a blockchain expert called Bjorn Bjercke was called by a recruitment agent, with a curious job offer. A cryptocurrency start-up from Bulgaria was looking for a chief technical officer.

What are the things that I'm going to have to do for this company? They don't have a blockchain today. You told me it was a cryptocurrency company. The agent replied that this was correct.

It was a cryptocurrency company, and it had been running for a while - but it didn't have a blockchain. One spring day a few months earlier, Jen McAdam received a message from a friend about an unmissable investment opportunity. Sitting at her computer, the Glaswegian clicked on a link and joined a OneCoin webinar. Over the next hour or so she listened carefully to people talking enthusiastically about this exciting new cryptocurrency - how it could transform her fortunes.

All of them were "very up-tempo, full of beans, full of passion", she remembers. It's going to go bigger. A speech Dr Ruja had given at a conference hosted by The Economist magazine was shown - and that's what clinched it for McAdam. The power of the woman - well done! I felt proud of her. It was easy: you purchased OneCoin tokens, and these then generated coins, which went into your account.

One day soon, she was told, she would be able to turn these coins back into euros or pounds. It seemed like easy money. The promoters said it was the larger packages that were really life-changing.

She watched excitedly on the OneCoin website as the value of her coins steadily rose. She started planning holidays and shopping trips. But towards the end of the year Jen McAdam was contacted by a stranger on the internet.

He claimed to be a good Samaritan, someone who had studied OneCoin carefully and wanted to speak to people who had invested. Reluctantly, she agreed to a conversation on Skype. It turned out to be a shouting match, but it would send McAdam's life in a new direction. The stranger was Timothy Curry, a Bitcoin enthusiast and cryptocurrency advocate.

He thought OneCoin would give cryptocurrencies a bad name, and he told McAdam bluntly that it was a scam - "the biggest scam in the [expletive] world". He said he could prove it, too. Over the next several weeks, Curry sent a stream of information about how cryptocurrencies work: links, articles, YouTube videos. He introduced her to Bjorn Bjercke, the blockchain developer who said there was no blockchain.

It took McAdam three months to go through it all, but questions were starting to form. She started asking the leaders of her OneCoin group if there was a blockchain. At first she was told it was something she didn't need to know, but when she persisted she finally got the truth in a voicemail in April And plus, as an application, it doesn't need a server behind it.

So it's our blockchain technology, a SQL server with a database. But by this stage, thanks to Curry and Bjercke, she knew that a standard SQL server database was no basis for a genuine cryptocurrency.

The manager of the database could go in and change it at will. The inescapable conclusion was that those rising numbers on the OneCoin website were meaningless - they were just numbers typed into a computer by a OneCoin employee.

Far from putting an end to their financial worries, she and her friends and family had thrown a quarter of a million euros away. Dr Ruja was still travelling the world to sell her vision - hopping from Macau to Dubai to Singapore, filling out arenas, pulling in new investors. OneCoin was still growing fast, and Dr Ruja was starting to spend her new fortune: buying multi-million-dollar properties in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, and the Black Sea resort of Sozopol.

In her downtime she would throw parties on her luxurious yacht The Davina. At one, in July , the American pop star Bebe Rexha performed a private set. Despite the successful facade, trouble was brewing.

The opening of a long-promised exchange that would allow OneCoin to be turned into cash kept being delayed - and investors were growing more and more concerned.

But when the day came, Dr Ruja - who was famously punctual - didn't show up. Nobody knew why she wasn't there," recalls one delegate.

Frantic calls and messages went unanswered. The head office in Sofia, where she was such an imposing presence, didn't know anything either. Dr Ruja had vanished. Some feared she'd been killed or kidnapped by the banks, who - they'd been told - had most to fear from the cryptocurrency revolution.

In fact, she had gone underground. FBI records presented in court documents earlier this year indicate that on 25 October , just two weeks after her Lisbon no-show, she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens. And then went completely off radar. That was the last time anyone saw or heard from Dr Ruja.

Igor Alberts is wearing black-and-gold everything. Black-and-gold shoes, black-and-gold pleated suit, black-and-gold shirt, black-and-gold sunglasses, and he has a thick black-and-gold ring on. And every item of clothing is Dolce and Gabbana. His wife, Andreea Cimbala, nods along, adding that if he wakes up and puts on pink underwear, he sticks to pink as he chooses his shirt, trousers and jacket.

They live in an enormous house in an affluent neighbourhood on the outskirts of Amsterdam. At the gated entrance to their mansion is a 10ft-high wrought iron gate with their names and the slogan "What dreams may come".

A Maserati and Aston Martin are parked outside. Alberts was brought up in a poor neighbourhood. Then he got into network marketing, or multi-level marketing MLM as it is often known, and started making money. Lots of money. I sell a box to my friends, Georgia and Phil, and make a small cut. But then I recruit Georgia and Phil to start selling too, and I make a cut on their sales as well.

They are now in what's called my downline.

Crypto exchange Binance hires former US Treasury criminal investigator

Virtual cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin gain a rapid growth in popularity. A major driver behind virtual currencies is the blockchain, a distributed shared public ledger recording every issued transaction of every participant. Analysing and structuring the vast amount of stored transactions introduces new challenges in criminal investigations. The dence blockchain investigator provides an intuitive interface to the exploration of blockchain data by implementing different types of views tabular and graphical views, custom filters, This improves the speed in understanding the chain of actions in criminal payments as well as relations between different transactions dramatically.

Let us take on bitcoin gangs, urge police

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Category Archives: Cryptocurrency

Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it for the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast , and trying to figure out where she's hiding.

The Canadian Guide to Crypto Investing

CipherBlade specializes in blockchain forensics and tracking Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies in investigations. We work with law enforcement, attorneys, regulators, blockchain companies, ICOs, high profile individuals, executives, crypto VC firms, exchanges and other entities in the cyber space. CipherBlade continues to grow, and in the past few months has seen unprecedented growth. As we had predicted, a bull market would usher in a new wave of new cryptocurrency users -- and, unfortunately, fraud. As cryptocurrencies become more widely-adopted, there is a continuing demand not just for scam and hack investigations, but expert services -- as two examples, in compliance advisory or as experts for attorneys.

British police seize 'record' haul of cryptocurrency

Dave Kleiman 22 January — 26 April [1] was an American computer forensics expert , an author or co-author of multiple books and a frequent speaker at security related events. Craig Steven Wright claims Kleiman was involved in the invention of Bitcoin , [4] [5] and that Wright himself was Satoshi Nakamoto , Bitcoin's main inventor. Wright's claims are widely regarded as a hoax. The commendation said in part, "Appearance, knowledge of general military subjects, current events and other subjects covered coupled with your strong dedication to duty, never failed to produce anything but outstanding results. After his recovery, he continued working at PBSO and attained the rank of detective. Kleiman went on to work at a number of high tech companies before becoming a partner in a computer forensics business.

Lincolnshire Police

Producer, director, actor and politician Kamal Haasan is set to become the first Indian celebrity to have his own digital avatar in a metaverse. Choose your reason below and click on the Report button. This will alert our moderators to take action. Nifty 17,

Is a computer the best detective?

RELATED VIDEO: YT vhai Crypto course v1 bitcoin

Prediction markets are a highly effective way to bring together dispersed information and insight into prices that reflect the likelihood of any future event. However, recent attempts to create centralized prediction markets have been thwarted by governments under antiquarian anti-gambling laws. Enter TruthCoin. TruthCoin is a prediction market currently in beta that will not depend on any central server or organization. This online market will be dispersed among all the participants and thus more difficult to shut down.

UK detectives seize a record $250 million in crypto

Have your funds been stolen? Don't lose hope! Our network of expert investigators may be able to help. Provide us with your email address. You will receive an invitation to our Service Desk, where you can share the details of your case.

If you want to be a contributor, please sign up here. Item number : See all. This Stock Illustration, whose title is "Detective bitcoin coin character cartoon"[], includes tags of detective, bitcoin, circle. The author of this item is kongvector No.